Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the jewels of medieval English poetry. It was written c1400 by an unknown poet and then was left hidden in private collections until the C19th when it emerged. It tells the story of a giant green knight who disrupts Christmas at Camelot, daring Gawain to cut off his head with an axe if he can do the same to Gawain the following year. Much to the surprise of Arthur's court, who were kicking the green head around, the decapitated body reaches for his head and rides off, leaving Gawain to face his promise and his apparently inevitable death the following Christmas.

I recently acquired a lovely copy of this book, published around 1900 by David Nutt. It’s a prose rendering by Miss Jessie Weston. She had previously had a translation of Wolfram’s Parzival published; Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was first of a series of translations entitled Arthurian Romances Unrepresented in Malory’s “Morte d’Arthur”.